Top 100 Quotes About Nostalgia
#1. I love the smell of old books, Mandy sighed, inhaling deeply with the book pressed against her face. The yellow pages smelled of wood and paper mills and mothballs.
Rebecca McNutt
#2. His eyesight was possessed by the colours of trauma, cracking and bubbling like an old Super Eight film to remind him of his near-death drowning some two months ago in that very moment when he needed to act.
Luke Taylor
#4. When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.
Jean Baudrillard
#5. I cannot think of a thing that was better in those good old days.
Rose Schneiderman
#6. It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.
Ally Condie
#7. Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.
Derek Walcott
#9. I want each day to last forever . . . It's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past. Even in the midst of a pleasurable outing I'm aware of how ephemeral it is.
Christina Baker Kline
#10. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#11. Some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not.
W. Somerset Maugham
#12. If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.
Milan Kundera
#13. I grew up on Stephen King, reading the books. I love the small town, 1950s feel to it, that nostalgia, and that old America. What happens when something weird starts happening to all these people, something other-worldly, something demonic?
Alexander Koch
#14. The moral and spiritual individuality comes here to live a painful adventure, full of frustrations, a dramatic experience of living in foreign lands, dominated by a constant, painful feeling of absence from its true home; a feeling of nostalgia, thirst and lack of fulfilment.
Paul Amadeus Dienach
#15. What other man, ever again, would just do as she commanded, no questions asked? She felt overwhelmed with love and loss and nostalgia for this bond that was not even yet in her past,
Barbara Kingsolver
#16. I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.
Patrick Modiano
#17. I'm not interested in nostalgia; I'm interested in who I am.
Ariel Pink
#18. As we age we begin to grasp at youthful bliss like a life raft in a sea of harsh reality.
Brad Herzog
#19. I think Baltimore suffers from nostalgia and it keeps us from being honest in talking about what really happened here. A place doesn't have to be perfect to be beloved, and I love this city and I love it better for seeing its flaws.
Laura Lippman
#20. The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
Milan Kundera
#21. It's just odd being a guest at the wedding. When you dreamed about it for so long, even if you we're a different person, and it was years ago. Sounds so stupid. I was stupid.
Harriet Evans
#22. In the Catskills, nostalgia runs backwards. The upwardly mobile Jewish masses of the 1950s and 1960s have been replaced by the Jews of 19th century Poland.
Kevin Haworth
#23. For me as a solo artist, I never want to be a nostalgia act.
Bret Michaels
#25. We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#26. I'm suspicious that what's behind the academic call for doing away with athletic scholarships is a nostalgia for the good old days, which leaves out everyone but white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, ... world's biggest cocktail party.
Scott MacDonald
#27. True, it would not be a new venture for him. But need it be? Could one possibly accuse him of nostalgia or idleness, of wasting his time simply because he had read the story two or three times before?
Amor Towles
#28. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
Vladimir Nabokov
#29. Our culture's obsession with vintage objects has rendered us unable to separate history from nostalgia. People want heart. They want a chaser of emotion with their aesthetics.
Sloane Crosley
#30. You made us for yourself, Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. In this creative restlessness beats and pulsates what is most deeply human - the search for truth, the insatiable need for the good, hunger for freedom, nostalgia for the beautiful, and the voice of conscience.
Pope John Paul II
#31. when a culture needs wise spiritual guidance the most, all it gets from religious leaders is anxious condemnation and critique, along with a big dose of nostalgia for the lost golden age of the good old days. We
Brian McLaren
#32. I don't think nostalgia is a healthy modality. But nostalgia and a sense of history are not the same thing. Nostalgia is a dysfunction of the historical impulse, or a corruption of the historical impulse.
William Gibson
#33. I am old enough to enjoy a bit of nostalgia, but wise enough to know that there haven't been any "good ol' days" since Eden (the garden, not the prime minister).
Ron Brackin
#35. Underwater madness slipping into a haze, drowning and choking in repugnant nostalgic thoughts.
Karen Quan
#36. We cling to the most painful reminders of our youth, our memories or our injuries, perhaps so we can look back to our former selves, console them, and say: Keep going. I know how the story ends.
Sarah Domet
#37. The log on the fire: is it dreaming of the forest?
Marty Rubin
#38. There's too much rock that relies a fetishism or nostalgia for the old ways. That's a real enemy to music.
Matt Tong
#39. How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?
Che Guevara
#40. So when I'm up here it feeds, for lack of a better word, nostalgia about my youth. Some people get that way when they see a baseball field or smell trout on the grill. I get that feeling from vertigo and the Freudian fantasy of falling to my certain death on the pavement.
Shane Kuhn
#41. Sentiment and nostalgia are fatal for fiction. One must go into the territory of the imagination with sure feet, hot fainting with glorious misery.
Lynn Freed
#42. I have no time for the endless nostalgia: 'Oh gosh I used to ... ' Life is too short; I don't have any time for sitting and saying I miss things. What's the point? Go and do something else.
Kate Adie
#43. Every time I open the drawer, it's a trip down Memory Lane, which, if you don't turn off at the right exit, merges straight into the Masochistic Nostalgia Highway.
Sloane Crosley
#44. Unlike his predecessors, Obama is not big on 'Masterpiece Theatre' nostalgia.
Tina Brown
#45. The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.
Amy Bloom
#46. I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the '60s and '70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the '20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II.
Terry Teachout
#47. In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.
Robert Hughes
#48. It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
Anatole Broyard
#49. The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is.
Lenny Bruce
#50. I don't think nostalgia has to be negative.
Van Morrison
#51. As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs.
Vladimir Nabokov
#52. Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had
Mignon McLaughlin
#53. Your generation was promised a decent husband and maybe a job on the side. Mine," I said with some nostalgia and a hint of disappointment, "mine was promised jet packs.
Holly Morris
#54. The young readers I have interacted with carry old concerns repackaged in the skin of a new generation: puzzlement over continuous national moral failings, contradictions with the elders, nostalgia for a nonexistent Kenyan past.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
#56. Nostalgia, as always, had wiped away the bad memories and magnified the good ones. no one was safe from its onslaught.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#57. A sackful of human flesh that lives off its nostalgia for other forgettable things until it comes face to face with what really matters, at which point it shivers like an engine before cutting out.
Miljenko Jergovic
#58. I decided to make pictures of fragments, images that would spill off the canvas instead of recede into it like a medicine cabinet. I wanted to find images that were in a 'nether-nether-land': things that were a little out of style but hadn't reached the point of nostalgia.
James Rosenquist
#59. I don't like nostalgia unless it's mine.
Lou Reed
#60. Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I have spent! And to see how
many of my old acquaintance are dead!
William Shakespeare
#61. Nostalgia is the intimate refuge of every man and every woman in a world seemingly gone mad.
John Larkins
#62. The hours were long, but the days were short, and as much as I willed it to never come, the end of summer arrived anyway.
Chelsey Philpot
#63. [On Jimmy Carter] Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place.
Marshall McLuhan
#64. Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.
Orhan Pamuk
#66. And I'll look back at him because I shan't be able to help it, remembering about being young, and about being made love to and making love, about pain and dancing and not being afraid of death, about all music I've ever loved, and every time I've been happy.
Jean Rhys
#67. I feel like I've never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in ... There's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself.
Sam Shepard
#68. The urban man is an uprooted tree, he can put out leaves, flowers and grow fruit but what a nostalgia his leaf, flower, and fruit will always have for mother earth!
Juan Ramon Jimenez
#69. It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.
Milan Kundera
#70. Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?
Margaret Atwood
#71. Preparing to go to school was like getting ready for extended deep sea diving.
Jean Shepherd
#72. When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered ... the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls ... bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory
Marcel Proust
#73. Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else. Change is scary for everyone, as is complexity, contradiction, and an uncertain future.
Gary Ross
#74. Nostalgia is my vice. Nostalgia is a melancholy, and slightly saccharine, sentiment, like tenderness
Isabel Allende
#76. Whenever I'm leaving I get sentimental for that nostalgia I know I won't have the next day.
Paul Neilan
#77. This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family.
John Thorn
#78. I have seen the poor suffer when nobles seek the purity of ideals. I have seen the powerless die when princes believe in the nostalgia of their dreams. I have seen the common people torn from peace and thrown into war when kings yearn to test the clarity of their vision.
Ken Liu
#79. I'm terribly nostalgic, but I'm with the Elizabethans who thought nostalgia was a disease. It's a dangerous place to be because you can get caught up in it.
Mark Gatiss
#80. Never look back; you may only find what you left or let you go.
Stefanos Livos
#81. nostalgia, the "if onlys" can be dangerous. It
Cathy Lamb
#82. The tragedy of my species xxx is that it does not live in its own time. Homo sapiens is locked on history's rearview mirror, never the road ahead, bent on catching some presumed lost paradise xxx
xxx
The human race is destroying itself with nostalgia ...
James K. Morrow
#83. The path of memory is neither straight or safe, and we travel down it at our risk.
Neil Gaiman
#84. Nostalgia is a lane of calm comfort, charming even a complacent heart!
Balroop Singh
#85. Nostalgia has nothing to do with aesthetics, it's not even connected to happy memories. We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we've lived there; whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters.
Michel Houellebecq
#86. My real desire is to see people live in the modus of our time, to participate in the contemporary world, to release themselves from nostalgia, antiquated traditions, old rituals, meaningless kitsch, and that we be conscious and sensorially attuned to this world in this moment that we are alive.
Karim Rashid
#87. What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
Terry Eagleton
#88. Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
Cyril Connolly
#89. If you want to write a novel about our world now, you'd better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain confused.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#90. Reading Ngo Tu Lap's poems, terrible nostalgia wells up in me- nostalgia for a lost time and a far-gone country, nostalgia for people I've loved, and for creatures of forests and rivers. I feel gratitude too. War is over. Peace arrives with these beautiful poems.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#91. The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes.
Milan Kundera
#92. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable
Albert Camus
#93. Mercy, mercy me, things ain't what they used to be.
Marvin Gaye
#94. The one piece of nostalgia he has allowed himself is the gleaming cast-iron wood-burning stove in the center of the room, which replaced his mother's that was stolen during the years the studio lay derelict.
Pierre Lemaitre
#95. The courtyard kept changing, dazzling her with the flowers that bloomed between one day and the next, with the bare branches of trees that were swollen with the buds of new leaves and then fuzzed with green. Every day, she drove a familiar road through a new place.
Anne Bishop
#96. ... nostalgia was once thought to be a mental illness or a physical affliction; for me, it was both.
Laura McHugh
#97. I remember when I used to be really into nostalgia.
Demetri Martin
#98. There is a hopeless longing for nostalgia that pervades the human soul, a return to the warm glow of remembrance or some imagined past.
Deborah L. Norris
#99. As the world grows older there is loss and gain - let us not with modern insolence and blindness imagine it all gain; [...] but neither must we with neo-pagan obscurity of thought imagine it all loss.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#100. What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.
Richard Ford
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